Apple makes gains in server market

Gartner Dataquest’s preliminary worldwide server shipment estimates for the third quarter of 2004 reveal that the market achieved its seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit year-over-year growth. Apple continued to re-establish itself in the server market, according to the analyst. After having above-average growth in the second quarter of 2004, Apple grew shipments 119 percent year over year.

Why open Mac bootware may be more practical

Open Firmware is software that is used after powering a machine to bring the operating system online (most visibly on PowerPC and SPARC systems), all modern Macintosh systems use it. This article looks at the Open Firmware spec, traces its history as a standard, examines how it works and some of its components, and discusses the benefits it offers. The best way to learn more about OF is to practice, to get a Mac, hold down command-option-O-F when you turn it on, and just start typing.

Sun Announces Solaris 10

Sun's upping the ante against Linux with Solaris 10. First, it will be available free for download, with a pay-for-support model. Also, a feature called Project Janus allows users "to create a virtual container inside Solaris in which they can run Linux applications."

Securing Windows XP

This guide will show you how to secure Windows XP. While it covers the basics it also goes beyond them without going into "paranoid" mode...This guide is for home users in a stand-alone or workgroup environment. It is intended as a step-by-step guide and we highly suggest you read through the entire article before taking any action. We welcome suggestions and feedback.

GNU Classpath 0.12 Released; Full JDK 1.0 Compatibility

GNU Classpath includes all native methods and core classes necessary for a completely functional Java runtime. This release features X.509 certificate path checking, signed JAR file support, full java.awt.color implementation, java.beans 1.4 updates, an improved build process, better AWT focus management, much faster and better fonts support, AWT Choice fixes, HTTP POST fixes, better collection documentation, Calendar bugfixes, lookahead support for regular expressions, fixes for jtree, and improved Eclipse 3 support.

MorphOS Developers Unpaid? MorphOS New Version Delayed

The Genesi-owned/sponsored Morphos.net website (Google cache) has been taken down and instead, a page, that reminds us a lot of the Amiga situation up to a few months ago, is described there. It claims that no new version of MorphOS will be released until payments are made to developers. The latest version of MorphOS is almost a year old already, while releases used to happen every few months in the past, usually.

Xcode 2: New Model of Development

With the so-called Tiger release of Mac OS X, due the first half of 2005, Apple Computer Inc. will unleash Xcode 2, a version of its rapid development environment that it claims will work with enhancements to the operating system that automatically generate object models, thereby simplifying application development. Xcode 2 also will introduce modeling, include the gcc 4.0 compiler optimized for G4 and G5 processors, and support 64-bit development.

The Upcoming Changes of the Gnome Subsystem

Anders Carlsson of Imendio outlines and explains (copy of the text) the API changes that are coming with the Gnome 3.0 release in the future. On other toolkit news, GTK# 1.0.4 and beta 1.9.0 (wrapping around Gnome 2.6) was released recently. You can rate GTK# here. Update: On yet another toolkit news, the latest release of the Ruby language bindings for Gnome, adds support for GnomePrint, GnomePrintUI, librsvg and Atk 1.7. Rate Ruby-Gnome here.

hOp, a Haskell OS

hOp is a micro-kernel based on the RTS of GHC. It is meant to enable people to experiment with writing device drivers in Haskell. Currently, hOp is still very hackish, and IA32-specific. More info here and here.